NocoBase and the mystery of the shifted timestamps: MySQL vs PostgreSQL, measured

There's a class of bug reports that keeps coming back in the NocoBase community, especially in the Chinese-language forum: "all my times are off by 8 hours" or "dates show up as the day before." China is UTC+8, so the shift is 8 hours there. I run my instances at UTC+9, and sure enough — my shift is 9 hours. Whatever your offset is, that's the size of your shift.

That pattern is a strong hint that this isn't random corruption. It's a mechanism. I set up NocoBase 2.x against both PostgreSQL and MySQL and measured what actually gets stored and how it gets reinterpreted, until the mystery had a concrete answer.

Test setup: NocoBase 2.0.51 and 2.1.23 (official Docker images) × PostgreSQL 16 and MySQL 8.4. All data written and read through the REST API, with the server timezone controlled via the container's TZ environment variable. I'm deliberately ignoring the browser-side rendering here — this is about what the server stores and how it interprets it.

Background: 2.x has four datetime field types

NocoBase 2.x collections offer four datetime-ish field types (,